On the theme of Groceries and Your Very Flesh.
EVERYTHING FIT TO CONSUME
For a month he was on a freegan kick and would only cook dinners he dug out of the trash. “A lot of food relies on rotting for its best flavor,” he told me. “What do you think blue cheese is? And mushrooms are just really big mold.” The next month he was into exotic foods, a whole menu of absurdities. Pied de cochon: a dinner of pig’s feet, if you can believe it. Haggis: oatmeal and leftovers stuffed inside a dead sheep’s stomach. Balut: a boiled egg with a full-grown chick inside, the milky eyes staring at you when you crack the shell.
I’d gotten used to him bringing home unusual cuisine, ideas he picked up from books or friends or the cooking channels. But I stayed away from the kitchen for weeks at a time, and I usually ate with my eyes closed. The whole thing seemed some harmless test–what of his was I willing to put in my mouth. I played along happily enough. But then he told me he wanted to cook human beings.
He said he knew it sounded insane, but I’m not sure he really heard himself. I’d just come home and he met me at the door, keys in his hands, his sunglasses on. We had laundry to do, two weeks worth of clothes piled in the hallways. The dishes had been stacked in the sink for two days. We were behind on our bills. But he kept trying to turn me back to the car. “It’s something to do with the proteins—they’re our own proteins. Where else to get the nutrients our body needs but from our own bodies?”
He called it a movement, like there were other people as crazy as he was. He said it had been going on for months, that it was consuming the foodie world. His actual words.
It all began when a sustainability nut was learning to butcher his own farm-bought meat. This guy had become comfortable with the slaughtering process but was dissatisfied with the choice of meats. Instead of pigs, he butchered wild hogs. Instead of cattle, he imported camels. Instead of chickens, he raised turkeys and then pheasants and then emu. No meat exotic enough, no idea too new. Then he saw a Dutch reality show, in which the hosts ate small pieces of each other as a stunt. A slice of buttock muscle—a wedge of love handle. A chef sautéed the human meat in sunflower oil and a pinch of salt, my boyfriend said. It was still fairly underground, but my boyfriend was dying to try it.
“Where the hell are you hearing this from?” I said. His ex-girlfriend, he said. We’d talked about this before, her constantly making plays for him, but he insisted it was just about the meat. They used to work in a restaurant together. Side by side, they cooked.
He jingled the keys, and I crossed my arms. I was the one, when we first got together, who’d insisted we talk about our exes, but his stories about her kept coming, every new detail about her a reduction of me.
He rolled his eyes. “It was an email,” he said. “I’ll freaking show it to you. Just some links to some damn recipes.”
“And now, what, you’re going to see her?”
“God, Audrey, would you just come on. We’re going to the store.”
“To what, buy people meat?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or something, I want to try out some of these recipes.”
“That she gave you.”
Just get in the goddamn car,” he said, and I didn’t want to but I did.
He was sullen the whole drive, and frankly, so was I.
We lived out in the country and faced a long road of silence, so finally I said, “How often do you two talk? Is she texting you, too?”
His hands squeezed tighter on the steering wheel. He wouldn’t look at me. He said, “Listen, I don’t actually hear from her that often, but you want to know the truth? She’s dying. She’s dying and she’s interested in this because it’s a way to help her family with the funeral costs. It’s like donating your body to science, but this way you get paid and people get to eat.”
“You are so full of shit,” I said, and that was it for the rest of the drive.
At the Whole Foods, I thought we’d head straight for the meat counter, but he stopped in the produce section, thumping gourds and holding up leaves of Swiss chard to the overhead lights. “Seasoning,” he kept saying. “Complementary foods.” We weighed out a pound of organic red onions, swung through dairy and selected a range of artisanal cheeses. Then the meat counter, all those slabs of beef and lamb. And a special display, a whole range of packaged steaks with photos on them like the backs of milk cartons. “Edward W,” one said, “car accident.” Another: “Fiona B, donated.” A whole range: “Daniel F, hiking accident. Gerald T, gang shooting. Victor M, physician-assisted suicide.” And by god, there was her face, the image of the woman I’d spent so many hours cutting out of the photos in his photo albums, the face I’d seen on Facebook several times a month, just checking on who she was talking to, how close she was to taking over my life. “Abigail P, breast cancer.” There was a pink ribbon on the package.
“Jesus,” he said. He lifted the package, a cut like a strip steak, stroked the plastic that covered the styrofoam. “I didn’t know she’d been so close.”
Then he held it up to me. “See?” He pointed at the little ribbon.
All I could think to say was, “They’re selling diseased meat?”
The butcher behind the counter heard me. “Oh, no, we run careful checks. Everything certified, everything fit to consume.”
“It’s not like it’s her breasts,” my boyfriend said.
“Actually, that—” the butcher reached for the package and my boyfriend showed it to him. “Yeah, that’s a brisket. Stomach muscle. Abs, you know?”
I felt my own stomach constrict.
“We have to buy this,” my boyfriend said.
I put a fist to my mouth, swallowed, said, “The hell we do.”
“Damn it, Audrey, this is important.”
“I’m not eating it.”
“You don’t have to.”
The butcher had backed away and was slicing prosciutto, but he kept glancing at us sideways, ready to step in and defend the meat. I gave him the finger.
“You want to eat some woman,” I said, “you wait until I die and then eat me.”
“I couldn’t,” he said.
“But you can eat her?”
He looked at the Abigail in his hands, both sets of fingers squeezing it like a bible.
“Yeah,” he said. He looked at me. “Yeah, I can. I need to.”
The dry ice from the meat case smelled sour. Someone bent around us and picked up Daniel F, then put him back and took Fiona B instead. My boyfriend moved aside, nodded at this stranger and smiled, then pushed the Abigail stomach back under my nose.
I couldn’t breathe anymore. All the blood went into my neck and my feet; I wanted to step out of my heels. I started to sweat. I realized I was still dressed from work, my cardigan and sweater and blouse and tank top and bra, and I wanted to start peeling away clothes. I wanted to get smaller, layer by layer.
“Audrey?” my boyfriend said. He looked from me to the meat. He moistened his lips with his tongue.
The butcher worked his prosciutto through the machine slicer, his arm going back and forth, back and forth. I watched the pink meat slivers fall into a folded pile.
Author Biography
Samuel Snoek-Brown is a writer. He’s also a production editor, for both Unshod Quills and Jersey Devil Press. He teaches writing in Portland, Oregon. He lives online at snoekbrown.com.